Tibco Expands Cloud Services, Partnerships

George Leopold

Tibco Software, the cloud and business intelligence specialist, announced a batch of upgraded services and partnerships this week, including expanded cloud-native support aimed at developers along with a cloud partnership with Microsoft Azure.

Tibco doubled down on its commitment to cloud-native software development based on open platforms with native support for GraphQL. The query language will be offered on Tibco’s platform service, making it what the company claims is the first to run natively on an enterprise platform.

As the role of application developers expands, Tibco also said it was rolling out a new open source project allowing developers to work with streaming data. The “streams designer” will fall under the company Project Flogo, the open source ecosystem for event-driven apps. The new tool is intended to allow developers to process raw data pipelines.

Along with cloud native and open source tools, the third leg in Tibco’s strategy is a using AI as a foundational technology on which software stacks will be built. The current approach is the reverse, with AI running on top of a traditional software stack. Exhorting the crowd at a company event, Tibco COO Matt Quinn declared: “Let’s flip the model!”

“You want to embed AI deep into the applications,” added CTO Nelson Petracek, who also heads Tibco Labs, created last year to foster development of AI, machine learning, blockchain and other emerging data technologies.

Meanwhile, Tibco is expanding is cloud partnerships to catch the wave of hybrid and multi-cloud deployments that allow customers to access data across different platforms. Tibco said its rebranded Cloud Integration – Connect offering will be its first running on Microsoft Azure. The partners said the integration would allow developers on the Tibco cloud to implement projects on a managed Azure service.

“We recognize that many customers already have a strong footprint with Azure, that developers need less complexity when building solutions, and that project managers and collaborative teams need their tools to work efficiently,” Quinn said in announcing the cloud integration. “Innovation is a team sport, and we want to [become] a $3 billion company building our partnership ecosystem,” Tibco CEO Dan Streetman added during the Chicago leg of its global tour on Tuesday (June 12).

The company also announced upgrades to its Spotfire analytics platform, including native support for Google BigQuery that would enable data scientists to run interactive analytics on large data sets via frameworks like Apache Spark.

Separately, Tibco released Spotfire web client that includes support for its data virtualization tools. The goal is to provide a unified view of disparate data sources, the company said.

Streetman, a former Salesforce senior vice president, also weighed in on the company’s (NYSE: CRM) June 10 acquisition of Tableau Software (NYSE: DATA). “Transactions like this reinforce the importance of data-driven insights everywhere,” Streetman said.